'On Hearing Samuel Beckett Refute His Birth Date' a short story by Graham Harper

On hearing Samuel Beckett refute his birth date my mother, who was pregnant with me, was thrown into a whirl. ‘He cannot’, she said to a gathering of friends who shared her view that he would praise their new club motto which, they had just decided, would be: Seek disorder, Live for enigma. Beware of fools and false causes. ‘Why would he refute it? He says it is in April. We say it is in May. Thirty days difference! But birth is the least ambiguous of occurrences – surely?’ ‘Surely’, they all said. ‘I’ll telephone him’, she said. ‘Though he’s old I imagine he works in the early hours of the morning. Don’t you imagine? Besides, we’re across the dateline, after all.’ ‘After all’, they said dully. She sensed that she had lost their attention as they had taken to playing eagerly again with their Chinese puzzles. ‘Look’, she shouted at them, knocking her glass from the table and spilling shiraz on her Aztec rug, ‘I will ring him. It’s daylight there, isn’t it? And why would he refute such a thing, after all?’ ‘Oh yes’, they cried in return, ‘why would he?’. Their voices came in cacophony, a clangorous hammering that both frightened her and made her think she was the brunt of another ill-considered joke. So she ordered them. out and heard them laughing down the college corridor and she swore then that they would not get away with treating her like that. Mother was no fool: she gave birth to me in a clean hostel. Her body, which was slender though big-shouldered and strong-armed, ached and wept like hell after my birth, but she told a nurse of no particular acquaintance, ‘We’ll have to celebrate this. Get up ‘til I embrace you!’. In the first days I grew eyebrows and formed rashes on my cheeks and chest. My hair, which had come into the world curled and pasted on my head, fell out after two days and new hair began to grow in two days more. Mother said that to watch me was to observe a miniature scene of such speed and ambition that she stood for hours in front of me. Door bells rang on and on as if they were the bells of Palm Sunday cathedrals. Dinner browned, crisped and burnt in the oven while I twitched my nose and curled my lip for her. ‘Unreal!’, she cried, soon after, ‘he has smiled’, and a gathering of neighbours was called to witness. I learnt then that my smile had not developed at the same rate as the rest of me but had waited one week in order to prepare me for an audience. I consumed milk from the breast and grew thicker in the legs and arms. What I did not require I excreted freely and without any care. The few cares I did have burst from me in a voice that I feared because it seemed so closely linked to the tightness in my belly and the itching on my scalp. This relationship of pain and voice intrigued me and caused me to lie awake when I should have been sleeping. In the first seven days I was passed by faces, legs, arms and abdomens of great size and thought they were complete pictures when they were, in truth, only flashes and fragments. I found that my movement could be brought about by thought and that thought could elicit further thought. Later I cursed this fact and became a champion of cold inspiration (a fact often connected to the ice blue of my eyes). Before fourteen days were over I knew I was a creature who was not alone and, though unsure of others, I always welcomed the cotton smoothness of mother. I developed an infant idea that linked pain and voice and the sudden appearance of people and I began to trust in it. I believed each day would start and finish when I wanted but when I found this was not the case I became annoyed with time that passed under rules I could not understand and expended itself in light and dark in intervals I could not influence. By imitation I learnt my first word. It had one syllable and could be made with my tongue and the ceiling of my mouth: Arrk. I spoke this word eagerly and received various replies. Sometimes these replies were long and tortuous and came with much expression. Other times these replies were brief and inadequate and came in passing. Still other times I would speak and speak and no one would reply. At the end of my first month my world was Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch, Thought. It was at this time that mother, noticing the sunshine outside, packed me up just as I had arrived and wheeled me out into the streets. Here friends, with clipboards and folders and briefcases, called out to us from the café in the square. They were full of the new play they had seen, and with me on this first time outside. ‘Well’, they called, ‘did you telephone Beckett? Did he talk to you?’ ‘Yes’, she said. ‘Yes?’, they cried, and they laughed loud and became excited. ‘What did he say? What?’ She looked down at me. ‘He said’, she called back to them, ‘that because he is on the other side of the dateline it is dark there when it is light here. What do you think?’ ‘What do you think?’ she called out to them. Then we pushed on toward the park.

Graham Harper

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